Monthly Archives: July 2012

On Canaletto and Guardi and Venetian Light

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In the art of the Venetian artist Canaletto (Antonio del Canale, 1697–1768), Venice returned to one of her oldest habits: the depiction and celebration of her own beauty. Unlike the works produced in Venice’s heyday, however, Canaletto’s art and that of his contemporary Francesco Guardi (1712–93), both of whom were at work in the last decades before the end of the Serene Republic, was a depiction without the glorification of earlier times. And the works attained international fame in the artists’ own lifetimes.

Canaletto’s views of Venice and its canals were exported widely, especially to England through the British Consul, Joseph Smith. Their popularity was due in part to the outstandingly rendered light and shadow which suffused the ordered spaces. His works give remarkable delight to the eye both from a distance and from close to. Canaletto came to London between 1746 and 1754 and painted it: in his views of the northern city, he performed the remarkable feat of making the banks of the Thames look as serenely lovely as the Bacino di San Marco. Stillness is all in Canaletto.

Canaletto: The Grand Canal and Church of the Salute viewed from the Bacino

The works of Guardi are far less serene.

Here, the coruscations of light and vibrancy of atmosphere reveal a diametrically different response to the city’s beauty, a response which was only appreciated many generations later, once European sensibilities had been educated to see things differently by the Impressionists. For Canaletto, the light is the vehicle of his passion for the architecture: for Guardi the architecture is a necessary receptacle for his passion for the light.

Guardi: the Church of the Salute and the Bacino treated in less serene, more Romantic way

The works of both these masters remind us that so much of Venetian art, indeed so much of the fascination of the city, has always depended upon its unique light—immediately, tangibly different from anywhere else in Italy because of the surrounding water which constantly modifies it. It is this that explains the primacy of the the visual sensibility in Venice: it has produced no internationally great writers, poets, thinkers or scientists. Venice has no Dante or Leonardo, no Galileo or Machiavelli; but it produced painters whose universal influence has been incomparable, because of one fundamental lesson they imbibed from the endless modulations of their native light. They instinctively understood how light in painting is the vehicle of human empathy.

An extract from the introduction to Blue Guide Venice. © Blue Guides. All rights reserved

Sicilian Holiday Reading

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Looking for some reading material to take to Sicily? If you haven’t encountered Inspector Montalbano yet, perhaps now is the time. He is the creation of Andrea Camilleri, currently Italy’s best-selling author (two million copies in 2010) and also the most translated of any Italian writer. His works have appeared in 37 countries, from Turkey and Israel to Japan and Korea, though his most ardent admirers outside Italy are in the USA and Germany.

Camilleri was born in 1925, in Porto Empedocle, on the coast southwest of Agrigento. The difficult task of rendering Camilleri’s idiosyncratic mix of Sicilian and Italian into other languages has been tackled with enthusiasm and imagination by his translators, doubtless contributing to his worldwide success. For the English versions, poet Stephen Sartarelli has invented a blend of New York-Brooklyn and Italian slang, describing his notable efforts as ‘fun’.

Episodes in recent Sicilian history, both amusing and sad at the same time, are made all the more credible by Camilleri’s deft character descriptions and his thorough understanding of human nature—but it was the invention of Inspector Salvo Montalbano that finally brought him fame. Salvo’s unorthodox investigations into the mysterious, sometimes horrific, crimes of his district are often hindered by his superiors, but are always successful, thanks to his stubbornness and intuition. No traditional hero, this man has plenty of human failings. Montalbano likes life. Cigarettes and strong coffee, long morning swims, abundant Sicilian food, the glass or so of whisky with his friend Ingrid, are to him as necessary as breathing. The fact that his fiancée lives in Genoa gives him freedom—he would find it difficult to share his existence with anybody on a permanent basis.

Porto Empedocle takes its name from the ancient philosopher Empedocles, born in Agrigento in the 5th century BC. He died a famous and dramatic death, by hurling himself into Mount Etna. In 2003 the little resort adopted another official name, Vigata, the name by which it is known in the Inspector Montalbano novels. If you find yourself getting really hooked, when in Sicily, take the Treno Montalbano, which runs between Syracuse and Scicli (every Saturday from April to October) visiting locations used in the popular TV series based on the novels.

381 years ago this June

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On June 17th 1631, in the central Indian town of Burhanpur, a royal wife died in childbirth at the age of 38, after delivering her fourteenth child. She was Arjumand Bano, better known as Mumtaz Mahal, one of the many wives of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. Six hundred and fifty kilometres away in Agra, the bereft emperor began the building of a mausoleum to the dead woman’s memory, on the banks of the river Yamuna. Its name, ‘Taj Mahal’ is probably a corruption of Mumtaz’s own, and literally means ‘Palace of the Crown’. It was completed in 1643.

As Sam Miller tells us in Blue Guide India:

“We know that Shah Jahan had a close relationship with Mumtaz, that he favoured her above his other wives, and openly declared the strength of his attachment to her. This was unusual but not unprecedented. She came from a very powerful family, where women played an important role. Her aunt Nur Jahan was married to Shah Jahan’s father, Emperor Jehangir, and in Jehangir’s final years took many key decisions. Mumtaz’s grandfather, Itimad ud-Daula, was, under Jehangir, probably the most influential person in the Mughal Empire. He lies buried in another exquisite tomb in Agra, which in its use of minarets, white marble and stone inlay, prefigures, on a much smaller scale, the Taj Mahal.”

“For the Mughal poet Kalim, the Taj Mahal was a cloud, and for the Nobel Prize-winning polymath Rabindranath Tagore it was ‘a teardrop on the cheek of time’. The Taj Mahal has been admired since it was created, and although it was undoubtedly a memorial to the undying love of Shah Jahan for his wife, it was also a demonstration of the power, wealth and aesthetic values of the Mughal Empire. In the prescient words of Shah Jahan’s court historian, Qazwini, the Taj Mahal would be a masterpiece for ages to come, and provide for ‘the amazement of all humanity’. It was built to be visited. As one of its most recent historians, Ebba Koch, explains, the Taj Mahal was constructed ‘with posterity in mind: we, the viewers, are part of its concept.’”

Text © Blue Guides/Sam Miller

Attila the Hun and the Foundation of Venice

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The Hungarian pavilion in the grounds of the Biennale by the Giardini Pubblici was built in 1909. Its exterior is decorated with mosaics by one of Hungary’s foremost exponents of the Secession, Aladár Kőrösfői Kriesch. They depict Attila the Hun. The one shown here has gold lettering underneath it, reading (in Hungarian): ‘The siege of Aquileia’. Attila attacked the city in AD 452. In Roman times it had been a flourishing trading post. In the early centuries of Christianity it was the seat of a patriarch. The siege was long and the city was well defended. Attila’s men began to be discouraged, and called for hostilities to be abandoned. But then Attila noticed a strange thing–at least, according to legend he did. Flocks of storks were abandoning the city, flying with their young into the countryside. He interpreted this as a sign that Aquileia was a doomed city and redoubled his efforts at conquest. The result was a pitiless sack. The survivors fled across the water to the lonely shoals of an uninhabited lagoon. The settlement they created here would one day become one of the greatest maritime republics the world has ever known. Venice.

Death in Venice cocktail a hit

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The Death in Venice cocktail crafted by the Hotel Excelsior’s Tony Micelotta and Robin Saikia, author of the Venice Lido: A Blue Guide Travel Monograph, proves to be a hit, the hotel’s best-selling cocktail in 2012.  See the recipe here »

An extract from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, whose hero dies of eating an over-ripe strawberry on the Lido beach, is one of the many included in the Blue Guide Literary Companion Venice.